Conventionally, systems for improving customer service by employing a customer support center or the like as a reception desk to field telephone calls from customers and contact a “customer relations coordinator” (dispatch staff member) and direct him toward the customer, when there is a telephone call from a customer, have been adopted widely in a variety of different fields.
Conventionally, one common method (first method) for selecting the dispatch staff member and performing the dispatch command was for each dispatch staff member to carry a pager, a wireless device, or a portable telephone, for example, and when a customer contacts the customer support center by telephone, the operator of the customer support center selects a suitable dispatch staff member to handle this request and sends a command to the pager or the like of that dispatch staff member, instructing him to proceed to the customer.
Alternatively, another method (second method) that is widely used is for the customer support center to send the same message to the pagers or the like of all dispatch staff members at once, and dispatch staff members that are capable of handling that customer request then notify the customer support center that they will proceed to that customer.
However, with the first conventional method mentioned above, the customer support center has no way to determine in real-time the current status of each dispatch staff member (whether he is working, on break, or traveling, for example) and the distance from the current location of the dispatch staff member to the customer to which he is to be dispatched, for example, and thus there was the problem that it was not always possible to select the most appropriate dispatch staff member to send to the customer.
Also, with the second method, there was no way for each dispatch staff member to know the current status of the other dispatch staff members, so that the dispatch staff member that contacts the customer support center is not necessarily the one that can reach the client in the shortest amount of time. Also, if a plurality of dispatch staff members contact the customer support center at the same time, then, when selecting one of the plurality of dispatch staff members, there was the same problem as with the first method.
Furthermore, when a dispatch request is made from a customer to the customer support center, it is first necessary to specify the address of that customer to which a dispatch staff member is to be dispatched when selecting the dispatch staff member to dispatch to that customer. In this case, if the address, for example, of the customer has been registered previously in a database, then the address can be specified quickly. However, if the address is not registered, such as in the case of a new customer, it is first necessary to ask the customer his address, and this was a problem because it precluded a fast response.
In order to solve these problems, it is an object of the present invention to provide a position information system with which, when a customer or the like makes a telephone call, the position of the customer or the like can be determined quickly based on the sender telephone number, and also to provide a dispatch support system with which a quick and reliable response is possible by determining the location and the current status of each dispatch staff member and appropriately selecting the staff member to be dispatched from the customer support center.